A Guide to Saving Jackson Overland Frost
by SaturnXK
Summary: Elsa is given a second chance to love Jack Frost, all over again. (Because life is just a series of dissonant minor chords and melodies made of alabaster and glass and ugly blotches of colour, and if you could rewrite history, even just a little bit, wouldn't you?) – Jack/Elsa. modern!au.


image taken from english dot cntv dot cn.

hello, i'm introducing some rare angst into the rotg/frozen fandom ;) this is like my longest oneshot to date.

**rating:** t for mature themes (suicide).

**warning:** mentions of suicide; please don't read if this is triggering. one swear word.

angst. angstangstaNGSTANGSTANGST–

* * *

**part one:** the breaking of routine

* * *

The ceiling shivers into view, bare light bulb and odd stains trembling as her eyes struggle to focus. She turns her head to the side, catches sight of a desk that's cluttered with coffee mugs and sheets of paper and dreams that have been neatly placed to the side.

There's a gentle pitter-patter of rain as her feet hit the cold floorboards, a soothing melody of monotone beats that grow light and heavy at intervals, crescendos and diminuendos. The scent of damp plaster and last night's dinner fills her nose, but she ignores it as she sets the water to boil and checks her schedule for the day.

_This diary belongs to: Elsa Queen_

It's become habit, really, because there's nothing to actually check. Her days are the same, has been so ever since she entered university and realised that becoming an artist is a waste of time and leads to nowhere. In a desperate bid to salvage her future, she switches to accounting, and ends up graduating and entering a firm running coffee for bosses who are too tired to care and staying overtime to finish off work that she would otherwise be fired for if not complete. It's not the life her eighteen-year-old self would have imagined, not at all.

But it's safe. Twenty-five-year-old Elsa supposes that she is content with her life, because her days are the same, and there's nothing scary or risky or dangerous about it. She goes to work from eight to five, returns home to an empty apartment, makes dinner for one, and sleeps the night away. It's predictable, and she likes it that way.

* * *

The breaking of routine appears in the form of dropped keys and muttered curses. It's a rainy Friday afternoon on the second of March, and the sky cries, each shriek a thunderclap that rings on in the ears. Elsa has stepped out of the elevator, snapping close her white, no-nonsense umbrella.

Immediately, she sees a figure right next to her door. He's hunched over, dripping wet, tendrils of white hair glued to his face from the rain. A guitar case sits next to him like a loyal dog, carefully wrapped in a raincoat, and scattered around him is a bag and a small suitcase.

Elsa daintily gives him a wide arc, pulling out her keys and keeping her eyes on her door. She doesn't say hello, gives no sign that she wants to be the nice neighbour who gives him strawberry cake on the weekends, nor give any indication that he even exists.

"Hey, I'm moving in next door! I guess we'll be neighbours, eh?"

The man's voice is deep, soft, like the mellow notes of a saxophone. Elsa finds herself glancing at his face, and almost regrets doing so. His eyes are wide, blue like the shades of a glacier, and earnest. He has cheekbones that could cut through glass, fair skin, and a smile that's much too bright for someone his age. He towers over her, all broad shoulders and long legs.

"Yes, I suppose we are," Elsa says quietly. She unlocks her door and then closes it unashamedly in his face.

* * *

Saturday morning brings about a summer storm, but Elsa is awake at seven o'clock regardless. There's a tapping on her door, like the sound a woodpecker makes, and she opens it without checking.

Her neighbour stands there, grinning sheepishly as he holds a small cup in his left hand. He's dressed in pink bunny pajamas, and Elsa wants to scoff at how childish he is.

"Sorry to wake you," he says, and he shifts from one foot to the other. "But, um, I don't have sugar and I would really like some sugar in my tea, because, you know, I like sugar. So, could I, er, have some sugar? Please?"

Elsa stares at him, trying to make sense of his jumble of words. Then, finally: "Sugar?"

The man nods.

She takes his cup wordlessly and heads to the kitchen, fills it up halfway, and then hands it back to him.

"Um, thank you," the man says. "I'm Jack, by the way. Jack Frost."

"Nice to meet you," Elsa replies. She doesn't give him her name. There's no need to.

But Jack is annoyingly persistent. Every day, at exactly seven o'clock in the morning, he would be at her front door with a "good morning!" and a cup. She always leaves him standing at the door, always giving short, curt answers, but Jack would still smile and wave and say thank you anyway.

"Stop thanking me," Elsa snaps irritably one day, about a month after Jack moved in. Jack raises an eyebrow. "I'm only giving you sugar to get rid of you. There's no consideration on my part, I'm not a good Samaritan, so stop. thanking. me."

Jack is silent, absent-mindedly tracing a finger around the rim of his cup of sugar. Then, with a gentle smile, he says, "Well, thanks anyway."

He leaves, and Elsa is left leaning against her doorway, head reeling.

Something stirs inside of her, something that she hasn't felt in a long time. She refuses to think of it as butterflies; she's not a teenage girl, but a woman who's tossed aside the notions of love, who's laid her dreams as an artist aside, who works in a firm crunching numbers and trying to please higher-ups for what purpose, she isn't sure anymore.

She isn't sure anymore.

* * *

The odd thing about Jack is the way he plays his music. He's not a singer, never opens his mouth in a song, but twangs each string on his guitar with a gentle intensity that oozes through the thin walls between them.

He plays all sorts of things from block chords to lone melodies to plucking a single middle F at exactly fifty-four metronome beats for an hour. Elsa doesn't understand his music, because it has no flow, no connecting note between anything he ever strums.

Nevertheless, as Elsa rests her head on her pillow and a devastated, inharmonic version of Guy Sebastian's _Don't Worry Be Happy_ winds into her ear, she finds that she sleeps a little easier, so she doesn't really mind.

Chance throws together Elsa and Jack one afternoon when the sky is the type of blue that's almost too dazzling for the naked eye. In a small park near the apartment complex, there's a bench behind a huge tree that's often overlooked because it's in a darker, shadier corner. Elsa likes to claim it as her own spot, because she's never seen anyone else use it apart from her.

But this dazzling blue day stops her in her tracks, a book gripped between long piano fingers, when she sees her neighbour sprawled along the peeling green bench with a copy of _The Snow Queen_ open on his face. He is sleeping, mouth open wide enough for her to pop an acorn into. She doesn't, of course. She hasn't been that childish for years.

She's about to walk away, because she refuses to share a space with anyone for more than fifteen minutes at a time unless completely necessary, when Jack rolls over and continues right off the bench onto the ground.

Jack gasps, one hand flying out to catch his fall, and as he blearily tries to figure out his surroundings, catches sight of Elsa and beams.

"Hey," he croaks, before she can run away.

"Hi," Elsa says unwillingly. "I'm going now, so bye."

"No, wait," Jack calls out. His white hair is mussed, sticking up at the back and flopping into his eyes. "Want to sit?"

"Okay."

She's furious at herself, because it's a bad idea. She doesn't do social situations, doesn't know how to start conversation or laugh at the right times. Hell, she doesn't even remember the last time she _laughed_ in general.

Her world is of numbers and Excel spreadsheets and grey days that blur by, nothing interesting enough to keep her grounded for any length of time. She goes to work from eight to five, doing a job that is mind-bogglingly boring and yet still has to be done, goes home to an empty apartment and cooks dinner for one. On a rare day, she might go out to the park, or do some grocery shopping. But it's tedious and it's expectable and it's _her_. She doesn't want it to change, too afraid of the unpredictable, and so she spends her life wasting away, a shell of what she could be, but too shy to step out and confront it.

For Elsa, sitting down with Jack, someone a little less than a stranger, is a gamble she's not sure she's ready to take. Jack is unforeseeable, an anomaly, a stray bullet in a round of perfect bulls eyes.

She sits down anyway.

Jack is a better conversationalist than her, but the silences are still awkward, stabbed with moments where both are looking away, because they don't know what to say. It's a terrible, uncomfortable twenty minutes, until Elsa can't stand it anymore and she excuses herself and rushes home.

But a week later, she comes back, and Jack is there again. And she sits, again, and they talk, again, and somehow, it's a little better this time round.

She's beginning to look forward to these meetings. And when she looks into her reflection one morning, she sees something different.

There's a spark in her eyes. Small, barely noticeable, but there.

* * *

It's been two months since Jack moved in, one week since Elsa had accidently given him her name, and only one day since she's come home to find police at his door and the landlady crying into her sleeve.

"Are you his neighbour?" a policewoman asks. She's brisk, to the point, cold. Elsa clutches her bag with fingers made of steel. She barely nods a confirmation. "I'm terribly sorry to inform you that the resident of this room, Jackson Overland Frost, twenty-six years old, committed suicide this morning at approximately ten o'clock. He jumped off a building. I'm so sorry."

There's a strange feeling in her chest, something like an explosion, or a loud shatter. Or maybe it's a soft crack, quiet, gentle, but no less painful, as her heart breaks into two.

* * *

The days after that are distorted. She continues to go to work, still wakes up at seven in the morning, still makes dinner for one. But these days, she enters reality with cheeks damp, scuffles around her workplace with limbs made of glass and a smile that's nothing more than an upward curve of the lips. Her dinners are coloured lumps of clay, there for decoration and nothing more.

Two weeks pass, and Elsa realises that she hates Jack Frost. She hates him for leaving her, hates him for giving her a sliver of happiness, hates that he gave her smiles that were filled with blue skies and cloudless days, hates that he gave her _hope_.

Because for once in her life, Elsa had been hopeful. His grins had been the same as a shot of alcohol, a dose of ecstasy in which she believed that anything was possible. He made her feel as if her life was worth living.

And she clung onto him, like a barnacle, because she _wanted_ to believe. And then he died, his flame snuffed out, and she's left stumbling alone in the darkness with one arm chopped off.

"Are you okay, Elsa?" Rapunzel asks. Rapunzel Corona, her co-worker and one of the few people whom Elsa didn't mind having a casual exchange with. "You're looking a little tired these days."

Elsa stares at Rapunzel for a while, and then, at the back of her throat, a small bubble of amusement erupts. The chuckle sounds false even to her, tinged with hysteria and dipped in grief.

"I'm fine," Elsa says when it dwindles away, and it's replaced with a hollow sort of emptiness that she's lived with for most of her life, except even deeper than that. "I'm just… having a bit of a downward curve, you know?"

"Yeah," Rapunzel says, and she gives her a sweet smile. "If you ever need anything, I'll be here."

"Thanks," Elsa says. She says it a lot, 'thanks', 'thank you', always showing her gratitude, except she never really means it. Those words are nothing but pleasantries needed to keep the world sane and polite. "I'll be fine."

But she's not fine. Far from it. She's not fine because she had been entertaining the notion of picking up her brushes again. She not fine because she'd started to believe that there is finally something worthwhile to paint. She's not fine, because her neighbour of two months, Jack Frost, less-than-a-stranger and almost-an-acquaintance and on-the-way-to-being-a-friend, leaped off a building as if he had wings, and ended up splattered on the ground surrounded by crimson and scarlet and red red red.

(She misses him. She will never admit it, because he is (was) nothing more than a man who pours (poured) his heartaches and uncertainties into the vibrations of a guitar, who asks (asked) her for sugar every morning at seven o'clock, who always forgets (forgot) to bring his laundry up from the dry-cleaners downstairs and runs (ran) down in nothing but his boxers and a thin shirt to collect it.

But his music soothes (soothed) her soul and his smiles shoots (shot) her monochromatic life with a hint of warm orange and yellow. And she wants it back, so, so badly, because she's selfish and always has been selfish.)

* * *

There's a tapping at her door, like the sound a woodpecker makes, and she opens it without checking. It's seven in the morning, and Elsa is too exhausted to wonder who it could be.

Jack stands before her, clothed pink bunny pajamas, grinning sheepishly, and he holds a small cup in his left hand.

"Sorry to wake you," he says, and he shifts from one foot to the other. "But, um, I don't have sugar and I would really like some sugar in my tea, because, you know, I like sugar. So, could I, er, have some sugar? Please?"

Elsa stares at him. "Jack?"

Jack furrows his brows, cocking his head. "How do you know my name? I only moved here yesterday."

Her mouth is numb, and she's holding onto her doorframe for dear life. "You–you're dead."

"I… am?" Jack looks down at himself. "Are you okay?"

"I–no, no, are you a ghost? Because you–you're supposed to be dead," Elsa whispers. She staggers back into her room, leaving her door ajar, and Jack peers in worriedly.

"Listen, if you don't want to give me sugar, that's fine. I'll just, uh, go somewhere else," Jack begins.

"No, no, you don't understand. You're supposed to be dead!" Elsa almost screams. "You died on the fifth of May, at nine fifty-four in the morning, because you committed suicide. You're _dead_."

"But–it's only the third of March," Jack says. His cup is trembling.

"What?"

Elsa scrambles for her phone, checking the date. Sure enough: March third. "This doesn't make any sense."

"I'll just–I'll just go now. Thanks anyway."

Elsa hears his footsteps grow dimmer, and the familiar phrase _thanks anyway_ burns in her throat. She spends the rest of the day curled up on her bed, skipping work, checking the date over and over and over again.

* * *

She wakes up the next morning, and immediately looks at her phone. The fourth of March.

A stone plummets into her stomach.

She goes to work, and it's exactly the same. Everything is the same. At nine o'clock, Rapunzel drops a stack of papers that ends with the boss yelling at her. At ten-thirty, there is a slight commotion because Merida receives roses from a secret admirer. Elsa is given the exact same duties as she was given the first time around, and her boss calls for coffee at exactly two minutes later than he usually does.

"Oh my god," Elsa murmurs to herself.

She returns home in a stupor, only to find herself face to face with Jack as soon as she steps off the elevator.

"Hey," Jack says. He's been waiting for her, leaning against her door with hands shoved into his pockets. "Um, could–could I talk to you?"

"Sure," Elsa says, while her mind says no, and he follows her into her apartment.

He's out of place there. His presence seems to soak up the room, like he's too big to be contained within these small four walls. As if he's meant for bigger and better things.

"About yesterday–"

"I'm sorry about that," Elsa cuts in. They stand opposite each other, and it's like there's an invisible barrier between them, a fence that stretches high, electric and untouchable. "I don't know what came over me."

"No, no," Jack says hastily, waving his hands. "I just, well. You said that I was dead? That I committed suicide on the fifth of May this year?"

A cold settles into Elsa's veins. "No, forget what I said. I was just blabbering, I got you confused with someone else–"

"Because I was thinking of committing suicide," Jack says, and he says it so quietly that Elsa almost doesn't hear him, "on the fifth of May."

"What?" Elsa breathes. The air is stagnant, heavy with a secret that is almost impossible to bear. In this moment, as Jack lifts his head to look at her directly in the eyes, it's as if she is looking into a pain that she will never truly understand, a churning black hole that sucks everything in, even light.

"I'm dying anyway," Jack says, and he raps his head. "Brain cancer. A tumor. I have, I don't know, three years or something left? Suicide would make it quicker, less painful."

"I'm sorry," is all Elsa can say. Jack laughs, and it's bitter, icy, the laugh of a man who is losing everything in life.

"What for?" Jack asks finally, when the echoes have faded away, and shadows are creeping up upon his skin.

* * *

Elsa doesn't know why time has suddenly turned back. She doesn't know why it's come back to the day Jack knocks on her apartment door, asking for a little cup of sugar. But she recognises this as a second chance, a way to save Jack Frost from himself.

And she's going to take it.

* * *

**part two:** guitar-trodden fingers and fairy godmothers

* * *

Saving Jackson Overland Frost is one of the hardest things Elsa has ever done.

"What do you want?" Jack asks dully when he opens his door. In the other timeline, Jack was happy, like a bumblebee in spring, or a puppy excitedly greeting its owner. In this timeline, however, Jack is sad.

It's very hard to describe, really. He's sad, not just emotionally, but physically as well. His long limbs weigh down, made of eggshells and porcelain, a smile of plastic and a crystal laugh that always sounds as if he is about to burst into tears. Elsa used to think that Jack's eyes were pretty, delicate, but now she's not so sure. His eyes are the complete opposite. The blue is nothing more than a shade that hides the turmoil within. They are black, helpless, and angry at the world.

"I brought you some sugar," Elsa responds, and she holds up the container.

Jack stares at her for a long time.

"I don't need you feeling sorry for me," Jack says at last. His voice is brittle, about to snap.

"I'm not," Elsa says. "I'm making amends."

Between them, there is a space that neither dare encroach. More than a personal bubble, it's a wall, a line that can't be crossed, for reasons unknown.

They stand there for an eternity, maybe more, until Jack steps to the side, allowing a space that only Elsa can fit through. She enters.

His apartment is bare, with only a desk, a mattress, and a music stand occupying the space. Even so, it seems like the smallest thing to Elsa, as if Jack realises that he won't be here long enough to make it home.

"You play." Elsa nods to the guitar abandoned on the mattress. It's not a question, but a dare. A step forwards, a judgment.

As if he knows, Jack picks up the guitar and strums it gently. A discord fills the air, before Jack rights himself and plucks a series of random chords. Minor G, a soft, glowing vibration. Then, with a placid shift of fingers barely noticeable, the simple C major chord sings out, the most basic of the basics. With a finalising flourish, Jack ends it with a dissonant slam, and the sound cuts off abruptly as Jack all but throws the guitar back on the mattress.

"It's beautiful," Elsa says, and the comment hangs heavy, a lie bathed in truth.

"I play down at this bar every Thursday and Friday night," Jack says. The words are muffled, seeping through an arm that has been thrown over his face.

"I'm Elsa," she says in response.

He chuckles, and there's an undercurrent of sourness underneath.

"Hi, Elsa," he says, and it's as if he's reciting lines that he's practiced one million times already. "I'm Jack Frost, and I'm dying of brain cancer, but I still want to become a musician who can perform on a stage lit with a thousand blinding lights and reduce my audiences to tears with a mere strike of a note."

"Hello, Jack," Elsa says, and she doesn't know why she's playing along with his game. The words are raw, frail, because she's never said this out loud to anyone before, "I'm Elsa Queen, and I left my dreams on my study desk seven years ago, placing them aside because a future as an artist who only paints in watercolours is unrealistic, and I'm afraid of failure, so I'm now an accountant who is nothing in the grand scheme of things, just a tiny little pebble at the bottom of the riverbed."

* * *

Things get a little easier after that. Not by much, but enough. Elsa still goes to work from five to eight, making coffee for bosses who are too tired to care and sometimes staying overtime to finish off work she would otherwise be fired for if not complete. But now, she returns home to an empty apartment for half an hour, makes dinner for two, and then heads next door and lets herself in with the spare key underneath the pot plant that separates their rooms.

Jack doesn't welcome her intrusion, always glaring up at her with eyes that are furious and burn with a rage that could ignite the fires of Hell.

But he still eats her food, under her watchful eye. And when he grudgingly finishes, Elsa smiles slightly at him and says, "Thank you."

Mid-April, Elsa chances upon the bar that Jack plays at one windy night. THE SNUGGLY DUCKLING is printed in stark, rigid font at the front.

As she enters, a tune flows out, a melody of twisting notes and drowning rhythms. It's the opening bars of a piano piece that she doesn't recognise. She steps in, sees Jack's familiar back at a small piano to the corner, and she thinks that it isn't right, because such beautiful music shouldn't be shoved to the side like a cheap street performance.

Each press is a sound that carves an ache in her bones. It snakes through the air, coils of G's and E's and B flats and A's, combinations of minor sevenths and major seconds and a final C sharp that tenses and then resolves to a D. But underneath it all, there is a painful screech to the notes, a dissonance that croons of a clash between a white and black key that live side by side.

It's a very tender reflection of Jack, Elsa realises. And, like on cue, the piece finishes, and the tantalizing final notes fade away into silence. No one claps, because his music is nothing more than background sound, and Elsa thinks that that is one of the saddest things for a musician to live with.

So Elsa, in her prim, proper office clothes, in her sleek black heels and perfect makeup, claps for him. Jack perks up, looks around, and the happiness in his eyes is so indescribably encouraging that Elsa feels a little bit of her soul being snatched away.

His blue (blue black blue) eyes fall on her, and he smiles faintly. Elsa is surprised to see something so genuine on him, and her lips curve in response. For a second, his face narrows, eyes turn green, freckles sprinkle his cheeks, and his hair turns strawberry-blonde. And then the illusion passes, and it's forgotten.

"What's the piece called?" Elsa asks him, as they sit at a table nursing soaring glasses of alcohol. Another musician has taken Jack's place, and she plays a melody of daisies and petunias and sweet, sweet roses.

"Don't know," Jack shrugs, downing his drink in one go. "I made it myself, but I haven't named it."

Elsa hums. "It's lovely."

Jack smiles at her again, and up close, Elsa sees that his smile is just synthetic shaped into beaming lips. Not genuine at all. But then again, maybe it wasn't even genuine in the first place. Up close, in the dim lights and murmuring voices and spirals of piano, with Jack's fake genuine grin in place, he is a marionette with his strings snipped and mouth gaping uncontrolled, forever wide open in a smile that's been a smile for so long, it's merely a show of teeth.

"Thank you," Jack says, and he is a bag of drying flesh with punctured lungs and a wet, beating heart.

* * *

"Why don't you do treatment?" Elsa asks. They sit together on Jack's mattress, watching _The Hangover_ on his laptop because Jack hates action, Elsa hates romance, and they both can't deal with anything other than comedy.

Jack doesn't answer, and at the part where Mr Chow enters the scene, he says, "Money. And it probably won't work anyway. Besides, it's not like I have anything to live for."

Mr Chow is shrieking and whacking everyone with a walking stick.

"My younger sister committed suicide when she was fourteen," Elsa says suddenly. Her eyes are glassy, mouth set in a line so straight, and she's staring a hole right through the screen. "Her name was Anna."

Jack doesn't look at her. "I'm sorry."

"I don't know why. She was fine. She was fine. I swear she was fine," Elsa continues, and she's beginning to babble, and she has to stop now or she'll say something she'll regret. "Just–she just–jumped off the school roof one day. Left a note, but all it said was _I'm sorry_."

The floor creaks as Elsa turns onto her side. The movie continues to play. Jack is silent.

The night passes without either of them noticing.

The next morning, when sunlight clothes the room in jaundice and birdsong, Jack asks Elsa, "So, why did you quit painting?"

A narrow set of shoulders lift up. A shrug that's thin and broken. "I just didn't feel it anymore."

"Well, why did you start painting in the first place?"

"Because it was nice to look at. Isn't that how all things start?" Elsa shoots back, and she doesn't really know why she's getting angry. "You started playing music because it sounded nice. The teenage girl falls in love with her celebrity because he's handsome beyond measure. The baker started baking because bread smells heavenly right out of the oven, and the taste is indescribable. I painted because the texture underneath my fingers is relaxing and calming, and I can manipulate the paint into whatever I want. How thin it is, how thick it is, I control it. And for most of my life, I was out of control, and painting gave me a means to take hold of it."

She's slightly breathless when she finishes, hands curled into hard balls of steel.

"I see," Jack says. He's turned away, blue (black blue green) eyes veiled with a sort of sadness that's a mixture of nostalgia and misery. "At least you know why you started. I don't know, I don't even know _why. _Just that in the end, I want to stand on a stage and die on a stage."

He draws a ragged breath, running guitar-trodden fingers through hair that's snow white and streaked with the remains of damaged thoughts.

"But I can't, see? I can't. I'm dying, Elsa. I'm fucking dying, and I'm not ready to die."

Elsa has no words to say. She doesn't know what she can do to make this better, because Jack is dying and she can't stop it because she's not God and she has no powers, no nothing, except for a bag of sugar and a jar of feeble words.

"Then–just–make the most of your remaining time," Elsa says lamely.

There is a loud explosion of laughter. Jack curls up on his bed, holding his sides as he laughs so hard that tears leak from the corners of his eyes. It almost looks as if he's crying, but Elsa pretends she doesn't notice.

"Man, if I had a dollar every time I hear that," Jack says, wiping his face. He chuckles once more, and it's hard to listen to. "Wow, ten points for originality right there."

"Shut up," Elsa mumbles. "What am I supposed to say?"

"Say that you'll cure me," Jack says jokingly, but neither of them laugh. "Say that you can take it away."

Both of them look at one another, and Elsa swallows once.

"I'm your fairy godmother," she says quietly, and she gives her own attempt at a smile. "And I'm here to make your dreams come true with a bibbity bobbity boo."

Jack laughs again, and it sags like despair on chains.

* * *

Sometimes, Elsa wakes up and the date flickers in and out, April then September then February then August. It always settles down though. Sometimes, she wakes up and the room is silver and then cream and then grey and then ivory, before it shimmers and then turns off-white, like it's meant to be.

Sometimes, Elsa wakes up, and she doesn't know who she is. Sometimes, she wakes up, and she's Anna and Elsa and Rapunzel and the old lady downstairs all mixed up together, and a long time passes before she can grasp her identity again.

But every time Elsa wakes up, Jack is always there. And that's enough for her.

In this reality, Jack is a constant, like painting was in her last. In this reality, Elsa needs him here, because he's a human anchor to keep her from getting lost in her mind.

So in a way, Elsa isn't really saving Jack from himself. She's using Jack to save herself.

The thought it so horribly greedy that Elsa immediately banishes it, casts it deep into the recesses of her awareness, to let it fester in the darkness, unconstrained, along with any feelings of Anna or her parents or her past life in general, which she's sliced off and hidden away.

However, the human consciousness has a way of pulling things back to the surface. It's cruel, cruel, terrible, but it happens. Elsa hates herself for it.

This time, she wakes up to frigid air and stale cupcakes. She's just re-lost Anna all over again, her dreamscape painting a vivid and unreal scenario of her sister's death. She wakes up to frigid air and stale cupcakes and salt water on her lips, and she scrubs at her face before she gets up.

Frosted, heart-shaped and crumbly, the cupcakes sit at her bedside table like sedentary pink guards. Jack had given them to her the day before, but Elsa doesn't eat sweet things. She can't eat it, because it turns into a concoction of regret and agony on her tongue, dashed with a hint of sugar, because Anna had a sweet tooth, and Anna is gone, and Elsa doesn't think it's fair that she's allowed to enjoy it when Anna isn't there to enjoy it with her.

She doesn't tell Jack, of course, but accepts them with a tilt of her head and an artificial smile.

"Why?" she had asked.

Jack had shrugged and said, "I made too many."

Now, staring at the cupcakes, Elsa feels bile rise in her throat, and she swipes a pale hand and the treats bounces one, twice, three times, scattering like colourful beads on her cold floorboards.

She rises and steps over them, and begins her day as usual.

* * *

**part three:** let's play this tune one last time

* * *

The day before yesterday, four months since Jack moved in and four still since time danced backwards, Elsa kisses Jack for the very first time.

Right afterwards, Jack pulls away and says, "Don't get attached to me, because I'll be gone tomorrow."

And Elsa pulls him flush against her and murmurs against the hollow of his throat, "I'm not."

It's an enticing melody Jack plays that night at the bar. Wisps of smoky piano, and for the first time ever, the hush hush solo of his voice, deep and rich like chocolate and coffee. He glances backwards, gaze flickering towards Elsa who sits at the corner with her long hair down and the corners of her red lips arching towards the sky.

She says, once, "I think I might like you."

There is a laugh, husky and smooth, and Jack replies, "I think I might like you, too."

Nowadays, they spend their time together in Elsa's apartment room. Jack's is too small and too bare for two. Elsa's, not much better, has at least a bed big enough for them both.

They don't do dates, aren't the type for coffee shop romances and cute strolls under a moonlit sky. Instead, they sit on a ground that's ridden with marks and huddle together in a heatless room, watching a marathon of television shows and stuffing themselves with takeout.

It's not the best of relationships, nor probably the healthiest, but they're satisfied, and isn't that enough?

But time goes on, and Jack starts to show signs. His cheeks are concave, eyes sinking deep into his face. He wears alabaster and icicles on his skin, and his long-limbed grace falters into that of a newborn calf's. One day, when they shower together and steam curls in foggy vines around their bodies, Elsa rests her head on his shoulder and counts the ridges of his spine.

"I've scheduled for a surgery," Jack confesses suddenly, mid-afternoon when they're both sleepily dozing off on Elsa's tiny couch.

"What?" Elsa says, bewildered. "When did this happen? Why didn't you talk to me?"

"It's tomorrow," Jack powers on, "at eleven in the morning."

Speechless, Elsa can only stare at him, eyes wide and mouth trembling.

"I just–this is all so sudden–I don't understand," Elsa stammers. Jack cups her chin with a soft, warm hand, and he just smiles at her, and this time, truly, it's real.

* * *

Elsa sits stiffly in a plastic chair and she doesn't remember how she got here, just that she's holding a Styrofoam cup of tea that's been cold for hours, as she waits for Jack's operation to finish. She didn't have enough time to mentally prepare herself, didn't have enough time to ready herself for the possibility that Jack might die, and she'd have to live with that.

Perhaps that's why he didn't tell her, really.

And after the world has ended a million times over, after Armageddon rises and falls like the coils of a spitting cobra, the silence is pierced with the clicking of a nurse's shoes.

"He's okay," the nurse says, and Elsa doesn't hear anything else.

She cries and doesn't stop crying as she clutches Jack's hands with both of her own and thanks a deity she wasn't sure she even believed in anymore.

Jack wakes nearly a day afterwards, and he's dazed by drugs and sleep. His head is shaved and serpentine tubes run around his body. But immediately, when Elsa's exhausted face comes into view, he draws a breath and whispers against his oxygen mask, "You're so beautiful."

Elsa gives him a muffled sob and buries her face into his chest and grips him and never plans on letting him go.

"Looks like you're a pretty good fairy godmother after all," Jack sighs out, and then he drifts off again.

It takes weeks for Jack to completely recover, and he still has chemotherapy sessions to get rid of the last little bit of the tumor left in his brain.

"But they're positive about it," Jack says brightly, "so stay strong, okay?"

Elsa nods, and Jack squeezes her lightly.

"You gave me a reason to live," Jack murmurs into her hair, and Elsa freezes. "Before, I really just wanted to die. There was no point in my life. But you helped me so, so, so much. So thank you, Elsa, for everything."

* * *

She's standing in an underground platform, and she isn't sure how she got here. She's in her work clothes, black and white, like the keys of a piano. There's something rumbling at the end of the tunnel, and then suddenly there's a mass of people hurrying onto a train that wasn't there before.

Underneath the six o'clock evening rush, Elsa hears the familiar strums of a guitar that drifts lazily in the air. And then suddenly everything clicks into place, and her head whips to the right, as if she knows exactly where he is.

There is a figure crouching on the wall, and he's plucking a cacophony of notes. Chords of minor fifths and perfect fourths and C's and D's and E's sing out like an excruciatingly familiar tune.

His name is on her lips, but as she runs forward, the figure looks up, and the words die away.

What was she about to say? She can't remember.

"Um…" she says. The stranger raises an eyebrow, guitar loose in his grasp.

"Are you okay, ma'am?" the stranger asks. His voice is wrong, deep but not deep enough, smooth but not smooth like his.

"I…" she trails off. "I'm fine, thank you."

She looks down to the phone that she wasn't aware she was holding.

OCTOBER 30 flashes out on her screen.

"Isn't it April?" she asks out loud, but no one answers her.

* * *

The ceiling shivers into view, bare light bulb and odd stains trembling as her eyes struggle to focus. She turns her head to the side, catches sight of a desk that's cluttered with coffee mugs and sheets of paper and dreams that have been neatly placed to the side.

There's a gentle pitter-patter of rain as her feet hit the cold floorboards, a soothing melody of monotone beats that grow light and heavy at intervals, crescendos and diminuendos. The scent of damp plaster and last night's dinner fills her nose, but she ignores it as she sets the water to boil and checks her schedule for the day.

_This diary belongs to: Elsa Queen_

There's a tapping on her door, like the sound a woodpecker makes, and she opens it without checking.

A man stands before her, white hair flopping into his eyes and mouth stretched into a wide, easy grin.

For a second, her mind draws a blank. But then, it all comes back to her at once, and she laughs and says, "Good morning, Jack!"

The name slips off her tongue, as if it were always meant to be.

"Morning, Elsa," Jack says, and he kisses her on the cheek. He's holding the morning paper and two croissants in his hand. "Have you made coffee?"

"I just woke up," Elsa groans, and she head-butts him playfully.

As Jack sets the water to boil, Elsa catches sight of a section of cutout newspaper that's scrunched up between a blue folder and the wall. She doesn't know why, but she smoothes it open, and it's yellowing and the ink is fading, but it's still legible.

MAN JUMPS OFF BUILDING

She remembers this. It's like a far-off dream, words spoken to her through a sheet of water. Something cold settles in her bones, manifests into a type of dread she doesn't know why she's feeling.

"But–time went back," Elsa says in confusion.

"Hm?" Jack peeks over her shoulder, and Elsa quickly flips the paper down.

"Nothing," Elsa says. She's willing her voice to stay even, but it's as if an arctic wind has frozen her joints.

Jackson Overland Frost, twenty-six, committed suicide  
on 5 May. He jumped off his company building, and died  
at approximately 9:54 in the morning.

She's been given a second chance to save Jack Frost, right?

Elsa turns to look at Jack, who's stirring two mugs of coffee, and then suddenly, there is an inkling, a poisonous thought that appears and consumes her being entirely.

"Jack," she says, "are you real?"

Jack pauses and faces her, confusion painted across his features in splashes of pearl and thunderclouds. A piano plays softly in the background, and a guitar plucks a triad three times gently in B minor.

He shrugs and says, "Well, of course I am, Elsa. I'm part of _you_, aren't I?"

* * *

The thing about guilt is that it does strange things to you. Because when Anna Queen committed suicide at the tender age of fourteen, Elsa was left behind in a world spiralling into darkness. Elsa had nothing to do with her death, nothing at all, but she was her elder sister.

"I should have noticed," Elsa lamented to her grief counselor, every day for a year afterwards.

Her watercolours lost interest, turned into ugly blotches on pulped, soaking paper, and she locked herself up in her room for far too long. It took years of therapy to integrate herself back into society, and even then, Elsa refused social contact.

So when Jack Frost moved in next door and Elsa allowed herself to open up after seven years of closure, it was a risk that had disastrous consequences if it backfired.

And it did.

Jack Frost killed himself only two months after they met, and Elsa couldn't take it. So in her head, she fashioned herself a new timeline, a new reality where Jack Frost didn't really die, and she was given a chance to save him, a chance she never got with Anna.

And she took it.

* * *

author's note:

wheeee~

(what i didn't really make clear here is that elsa is actually the one with brain cancer. she's projected it onto jack, and she's trying to save him in an attempt to save herself, and also 'redeeming' herself for not managing to save anna 7 years ago, therefore making jack a reflection of both herself and anna. due to the combination of brain cancer's effects (memory loss, hallucinations etc.) and the fact that she still hasn't gotten over the shock of anna's suicide, elsa's become… slightly psychotic?)

drop all your questions in a review, because i can totally explain to you ahahaha.

thank you so much for reading this super long fic :)

edit: 28 March 2014

Artoriious has put this fic on his rec list on tumblr, but I'm telling you to look at his graphic edits. Really, they're so pretty ;A; (link in profile).


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